Trump, the Great De-Mythologizer

WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 20: U.S. President Donald Trump celebrates Congress passing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on the South Lawn of the White House. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Greg Weiner seeks a virtuous mean between two extremes—between, on the one hand, idolization of President Trump and, on the other, the demonization of everything for which he stands. In rejecting Trump the man, the Never Trump splinter of the conservative movement risks failing to learn the lessons that his successes have communicated. Those successes have been considerable, and Weiner does not go quite far enough in enumerating them.

But there is a more serious flaw in Weiner’s Liberty Forum essay: its author misjudges the spectrum along which a virtuous mean is to be found. Trump is in fact far less subject to idolization than either Barack Obama or George W. Bush had been. And Never Trump is in reality something that long preceded Trump’s candidacy and presidency. It is a tendency that has wanted for a half-century to move the Republican Party in a “modern” direction, to the detriment of conservative principles—and, as the record shows, to the detriment of the country, too.

Let me begin with a reminder of Trump’s political achievements. He won states in 2016 that had been out of reach for Republican presidential candidates for 25 years or more: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. For all that the people who now criticize Trump had talked about broadening the Republican Party’s appeal, it was Trump who actually broadened the party in the way that counts—by winning elections rather than by scoring meaningless diversity points with the priesthood of multiculturalism.

As President, Trump has delivered relief to some 80 percent of taxpayers. The tax law just passed has also taken the teeth out of Obamacare, removing the feature most philosophically objectionable to conservatives—the individual mandate, which forced citizens to buy a private product (or at least a product whose profits lined politically connected private pockets) as a condition of living. If Obamacare truly is the great service that Democrats insist it is, now the public can freely choose to purchase it.

The economy has been performing well under President Trump, and there is no reason to be stingy about crediting him for what he has not done. After all, if free-market economics is correct, the best course a government can take is usually to leave well enough alone. Trump has done that and something more: He has sent businesses a powerful signal. Job-creation and entrepreneurship were choked during the Obama years by what Robert Higgs has called “regime uncertainty,” the fear that at any moment unexpected new regulations could make new ventures hazardous. That fear has been dispelled under Trump, who has made a start at dismantling old regulations and—even more importantly—is trusted not to impose capricious new ones.

The character of an administration—as distinct from the personal character of the President—is of the utmost consequence not only in domestic policy but also for foreign policy. Under Trump, ISIS has been smashed militarily. But the spirit that animates ISIS has also received blow after blow. Instead of Americans being cowed and timid, more worried about giving offense than asserting the justice of our civilization, there is a new vigor in the country’s words and deeds.

In the same way that the socialists and liberals who thought communism half-correct were not the men and women to bring the Cold War to a peaceful end, liberals and give-no-offense Republicans are not the ones who will annihilate the morale of Islamist radicalism. President Trump can be crude in how he expresses the will to win the war of confidence. But for too long we have had leaders who refused to speak in the language of America First and Western Civilization First, even as they invaded Iraq and brought regime change to Libya—violent actions that were spectacularly counterproductive. To see liberals now claim that President Trump’s intemperate tweets might make us more enemies—as if our bombs and nation-building escapades had not been doing that for 15 years—is telling.

Trump may go too far; others refused to go far enough. Not violent language but clarion language, in place of violent but strategically impotent actions, is what we need. That was what Ronald Reagan gave us at the end of the Cold War, in place of the futile hot wars and weak language of the administrations that preceded him. He won on the battlefield of morale. President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is a masterstroke in this regard. It merely acknowledges an on-the-ground reality, but its symbolic importance is vast. It shows Islamists and their sympathizers that their cause is losing ground, and it puts pressure on regimes such as Saudi Arabia to choose between clinging to Islamist ideology or accepting differences with the United States in a diplomatic fashion.

To be sure, the relationship between Washington and Riyadh continues to be unwholesome, and Trump’s support for the Saudis’ war in Yemen is a humanitarian disaster that risks turning out much like Obama’s meddling in Libya. The administration has made ill-considered moves to increase the presence of U.S. “advisors” on the ground in other hotspots of the Islamic world as well, even as the President has imposed new immigration controls on travel from those same hotspots. The administration would do well to look at the long-term success and failure of Reagan’s European and Third World strategies—a study in contrasts. We need more Polands and fewer Afghanistans.

But here we see the falsity of claims that conservatives have succumbed to a Trump cult of personality. Even the President’s most ardent supporters, from Ann Coulter to the comment boards at Breitbart.com, registered fierce opposition to his decision to bomb Syrian airfields last spring, as they feared another debacle like those in Iraq and Libya. And if there were a cult of Trump, it would have made the Trump-endorsed candidate in Alabama’s Republican primary, Luther Strange, the party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate last year instead of Roy Moore. No doubt there are conservatives and Republicans who believe that Trump can do no wrong, as every President has his sycophants. But there is a universe of difference between what little blind faith there is in Trump today and the virtual infallibility that was once ascribed by movement conservative leaders to George W. Bush.

Trump has done more to demythologize the presidency than to build up the cult of the commander-in-chief. That’s hardly because he’s a modest man, but his immodesty leads him to speak truths that were unsayable in American politics just a few years ago. Trump has not let the Jimmy Carter of the 21st century, Barack Obama, bask in unearned glory in retirement: Obama’s “hope” and “change” were failures on every front, foreign and domestic, leaving a country with rising homicides in major cities (including his not-quite-hometown, Chicago), a torpid economy, and spiraling epidemics of opioids and despair. Trump has been no mere partisan score-settler when it comes to the reputations of Presidents past, however; he has also refused to perpetuate the myth of the “man who kept us safe,” under whose administration, in fact, more Americans died from terrorism than under any other President.

The cult of personality surrounding George W. Bush was not the imaginary thing that the Trump cult is. There were serious career consequences for conservatives who spoke out against Bush in the way that Bush’s longtime defenders now speak out against Trump. My colleague Donald Devine was nearly fired by a previous employer because he did not give Bush 43 a standing ovation; Devine, who had served as Reagan’s director of the Office of Personnel Management, failed to see what was “conservative” about a President whose early acts in office included the largest expansion of entitlements since Lyndon Johnson (Medicare Part D) and a bipartisan scheme cooked up with Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) to expand the Department of Education.

I began working in conservative journalism in 2003, and I can attest to the night-and-day difference between the oppression of the Bush years and the openness of today. Now the largest-circulation conservative print publications are known for having been Never Trump in 2016, and they still feature many writers who fit that description. In their pages there is debate about the merits and vices of the new administration. By contrast, in the early 2000s practically the only way to get serious criticism of the Republican President into a conservative magazine was to start a new one.

This was so despite the norms and constitutional safeguards that the last Republican President shredded, not least our civilization’s fundamental norms against unnecessary war and the sanctioned use of torture. Donald Trump may yet follow the baleful precedent set by his predecessor—Weiner is right to warn that once a norm has been torn down, it may never be recovered. But these are the stakes that matter, not whether the President tweets insults at the media or his political opponents.

Something must be said about the styles of untruthfulness that characterize different administrations as well. No American will have any difficulty thinking of instances where Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or any number of other leaders misled the public. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan,” right? Saddam’s WMD. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinski.” That’s just a recent selection.

Even those untruths tended to be couched carefully, however—just what are “sexual relations” in the strict legal or biological sense?—and Americans are anyway accustomed to misrepresentation in politics: bureaucratic blather, euphemism, and technically truthful words uttered with a disconnect between the speaker’s inner intentions and the effect he knows he will have on his audience. Most political untruths are not lies in the most literal sense, just as oral intercourse is not “sexual relations” in the most literal sense. But deceit is every bit as much the point.

President Trump prefers exaggeration to subtlety. He tells whoppers. He says a great many things that even sympathetic listeners have a hard time giving the slightest credence—so much so that during the 2016 campaign it became a truism that Trump should be taken “seriously, but not literally” rather than “literally, but not seriously.” He often seems to insist most strenuously on exaggerating things that are most trivial—such the size of the crowd at his inauguration, which his press secretary was forced to claim was larger than the one that had turned out for Barack Obama in 2009.

Leaders lie, and they do it everywhere except in Utopia. Yet some lies are more dangerous than others. The subtle lie is doubly pernicious: first because it is more likely to be believed by the unskeptical and second because once listeners have become inured to such deceit, they become not just skeptical but cynical. The result is a complete loss of faith in what public figures say. This was the situation when Trump arrived on the scene. But he represents a change: everyone knows what he means whenever he speaks, no matter what he says. His tactlessness might be an overreaction to the jaded political discourse that came before, but there is no question that what came before was corrosive to the republic in ways that elicited none of the conscious resistance with which Trump’s bombast has been met.

On policy specifics as well as matters of style and character, there are ample grounds for conservatives to air their differences with and about President Trump. There is never anything inherently disloyal in a conservative, or anyone else, criticizing a leader. As Weiner’s thoughtful essay indicates, not every conservative who takes a critical view of this President can labeled “Never Trump.” Yet the Never Trump phenomenon is real, and it deserves closer scrutiny than it has so far received—above all scrutiny of whether it is really about Trump or would be more accurately called “Never Conservative.”

Weiner acknowledges that Donald Trump has accomplished conservative goals, but he says he has done so in an un-conservative manner. Yet we have long seen in Republican politics, including in both Bush administrations, what the opposite combination looks like: a conservative veneer in the service of un-conservative goals, such as the first Bush’s tax hikes and the second Bush’s Medicare expansion at home and nation-building abroad. Some self-identified conservatives prefer the appearance of conservatism, coupled with policies that reinforce the welfare-warfare state, to the practice of conservatism if that practice entails disrupting Washington, D.C.’s norms.

This division among self-described conservatives did not begin with Donald Trump. As different as he may be from Ronald Reagan, and as different as Reagan was from Barry Goldwater—a smaller difference, it must be said— the intramural critics of all three are strikingly similar. The Rockefeller Republicans of 1964, including Nelson Rockefeller himself and Michigan Governor George Romney—yes, Mitt’s father—refused to support Goldwater, whom they characterized as an extremist (or as culpable for his supporters’ extremism).

Goldwater then, like Trump now, was tarred as ignorant, unqualified, reckless, not to be trusted with nukes, and possibly outright insane. Reagan, like Trump, was too old, an unqualified showbiz idiot, an extremist (or culpable for his supporters’ extremism), and possibly in deteriorating mental health. The “Never Reagan” movement was so strong that it fielded its own presidential candidate in the Election of 1980, one who did much better than Never Trump’s Evan McMullin 36 years later. While McMullin mustered barely more than half a percent of the popular vote, the anti-Reagan Republican John Anderson took nearly 7 percent.

Just like Never Trump, the Republican opponents of Goldwater and Reagan claimed to be on the side of moderation against extremism and expertise against ignorance. They wanted to exclude in turn the Goldwaterites, the Reaganites, and the Trumpists in the name of a more inclusive Republican Party. And in the administrations of the two George Bushes, they got what they wanted: the elder purged his administration of Reaganites, the younger presided over an era of enforced conformism in the conservative movement.

Of the four Republican Presidents of the last 40 years, Reagan and Trump have pursued what might be seen as radical approaches to a conservative agenda in Washington, while the two Bushes tried to soften conservatism with concessions to liberalism. (The difference here is not free-market orthodoxy versus big government, it must be said. Trump, the Bushes, and even Reagan have all frustrated libertarians.) And it’s worth noting that the biggest names among Never Trumpers are Republicans who worked for or strongly supported the second Bush. David Frum, Michael Gerson, and Peter Wehner, for example, were all Bush speechwriters.

Two very different tendencies lay claim to the name of “conservatism.” They lay competing claims to its genealogy as well. Greg Weiner is an independent thinker, but his understanding of Edmund Burke, James Madison, and Aristotle seems to derive entirely from one side of this dispute. Let me suggest how the other side sees it. Burke was not against all change— “A state without the means of some change,” he said, “is without the means of its own conservation”—and certainly he was no stranger to impassioned language. Burke was and still is tarred as an extremist by those who think that he overreacted to the French Revolution and even earlier to the system of “double cabinet” in George III’s government. Burke was not for maintaining the “norms” of King George’s court; he wanted to “drain the swamp.”

James Madison was also no enemy to salutary change. He twice took part in the substitution of one constitutional order for another, first during the American Revolution and afterwards as father of a new charter of government. Madison overturned plenty of “norms” in both respects. Aristotle, meanwhile, was hardly unaccustomed to arrogant or abnormal behavior on the part of figures like Philip II of Macedon or that king’s son, Alexander the Great, who was the Stagirite’s pupil.

Burke did not aspire to be moderate in his criticisms of the Jacobin assault on church and property. What would he think of Trump? He might very well think him uncouth, perhaps characteristically democratic and demagogic. But he would, I suspect, find much more fault with those Americans who, like the Jacobins, aim to revolutionize our country’s rights of property and religion.

Would Madison find Trump’s agenda too radical? Madison himself was radical enough to have supported “interposition” as a response to what he perceived as the dangerous statism of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Would he be less concerned about today’s administrative state and deep state?

And how about Aristotle, would he be so appalled by Trump’s intemperance as to prefer the slow suicide of Western civilization (his own offspring, in a real sense) orchestrated by leftist ideologues and conservatives too diffident to resist them?

All three men would dislike Trump’s manner; but all three, I am confident, would find the very philosophical foundations of Trump’s enemies, Republican as well as Democratic, absolutely unacceptable.

I appreciate this article defending Trump in response to Weiner’s confused, confusing attack of Trump’s presidency. As I noted in my criticism of Weiner’s article, Law and Liberty seems to be tilting sharply in the Never Trump direction, what with Weiner’s negative commentary constituting its third mostly anti-Trump analysis in a period of two weeks.

Further indicia of that unfortunate drift may be reflected in the fact that my comment herein praising Daniel McCarthy’s outstanding defense of Trump is merely the 3rd favorable comment on that defense.

McCarthy’s defense of Trump seems to have gone underappreciated on this site.
I will restate, below, my lengthy criticism of January 3 on Law and Liberty’s recent articles on Trump, including Weiner’s article:

“As a well-read student and ardent admirer of Edmund Burke (whom the Left has always despised) and of Alexander Hamilton ( five decades before the Left made him their musical abolitionist rock-star I was Hamilton-cool when Hamilton wasn’t cool) I am disappointed to see L&L publish in the span of two weeks three poorly conceived, badly written, intellectually confused and confusing articles that strongly disparage Trump’s presidency. The last two of these articles (by McGinnis last week and Weiner yesterday) damned Trump after faint praise; the first article, a book review two weeks ago, condemned a recent book praising Trump and also condemned its quirky author (the Leftie, Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert) for praising Trump.
McGinnis’ article last week set off a firestorm of commentary among L&L readers, not because of its major criticisms of Trump but, oddly, because of its minor compliments of the President. To make conservative matters at L&L even more confusing, its contributor’s poisonous review of Scott Adams’ book praising Trump generated from L&L readers not so much contradiction of Adams’ praise of Trump as antagonism toward Adams for his Leftist past.
And yesterday we got Weiner’s mal-encomium of Trump, aimed it would appear at neither praise nor burial, an “analysis” (sic) which is too-confused and confusing even to merit serious comment without its first undergoing a serious rewrite.
Yes, conservatives are Israelites wandering in the Wilderness, Christians approaching their Dark Night of the Soul. But no, Trump did not lead conservatives into the Wilderness, and he does not embody their Dark Night of the Soul. To the contrary, Trump has joined conservatives in, not led them into, the Wilderness and joins them in their soul-searching.
We can get through this but only if we stand together. (Franklin’s “hang separately” comes to mind.)
Rightly understood (as Victor Davis Hanson at NR and Charles Kesler at CRB understand and have analyzed the man’s motives and politics) Trump, at his worst, is a wrongly-accused patriot, a competent Commander Queeg, perhaps a Fletcher Christian, but certainly not a Lieutenant Bligh, and conservatives will not find their souls through an act of mutiny on the Trump Train. ( Metaphors of Biblical suffering and transportation travail are hard to mix.)
Relentless conservative assaults on Trump are only reinforcing the the enemy’s insurrection. Open attacks on their leader are suicidal for conservatives and destructive of the principles for which they stand. It’s high time conservatives conspired to wage an apologetic if not a whole-hearted defense of Trump.
Trump reminds me of Dan Quayle, conservatives’ only fighter in the 1992 presidential campaign, and of Dick Cheney, conservatives’ only fighter in the dismal years of George W. Bush, and of Sarah Palin, conservatives’ only fighter in the dismal 2008 presidential campaign of John McCain. ( It so looked like “Refuse-to-Fight” Romney took a dive in 2012 that I can’t bear the pain of recalling the campaign.)
Love him (unlikely) or hate the man (understandable,) Trump is conservatives’ last best hope to restore constitutional originalism and liberty under the rule of law. (Even Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan seem belatedly to have come to that reality.)
In the Spring of 1862 when the yet-to-be-tested General Grant was widely (but falsely) rumored to be a drunk and had just suffered the stigma of being caught unawares at Shiloh, President Lincoln was urged by his Cabinet to dump Grant. Lincoln replied, “I can’t spare this man, he fights.”
Not again until May, 1940 when Churchill faced down the appeasers of his War Cabinet would such momentous words be spoken.
Trump fights; he fights the bad guys (and they’re really, really bad,) and Trump’s winning ”bigly” in the face of the biggest odds, the most ruthless political sabotage we’ve seen in America. We can’t spare this fighting man because it’s a war we’re in.
What’s not to like about Trump is worth conservatives complaining about , but it’s not worth our dying over.
Trump fights, and it’s a war we’re in.”

Maybe the Trump cult seems larger than it really is because its members are (rightly or wrongly) so viscerally angry? “If you voted for John Anderson, you must like to watch other men have sex with your wife” is probably not a sentence that was uttered very often in 1980. Now that insult is so commonplace that people rarely stop to reflect on the literal meaning.

Sadly so many of my conservative friends are living in a Fox News bubble. You have to be to conclude that the Trump presidency is succeeding. It’s been a train wreck from Day 1. We Republicans and our conservative ideals are being deeply tarnished by the Trump presidency. It will take us a generation to recover from the damage Trump is doing to the conservative movement I have fought for all my life.

The moderate republicans like Graham, McCain, Jeb and W have put this country into a hole. They are here to modernize the Republican party into a mirror image of the democrats…No principals…just appealing to a trending base. Fingers in the air see where the wind blows. We are done with the Rove’s, the Vallerie Jarret’s, this political whispers class of expansion and globalism. the United Nations has never worked…corruption goes unchecked everywhere….the political hiding. Never Trump are rejecting the reality of the actual mess we are in.. The author really has described how Hope and Change of political novices has set this country back. A community organizer with no experience in anything, a secretary of state that has no political experience or diplomacy understanding in the world. The Spinmeisters who play up their potential success, when everything they have touched has failed miserably.

Democrats have no future, they have no bench, they have no ideas just politcalisms. The Republicans as you know them are not far behind…let the RINOs talk to themselves. Weaponized departments trying to keep the Status Qou…..

Trump, unlike many Never Trumpers, does not melt at Democratic party ad hominem attacks and innuendo. I supported the candidate who best demonstrated the Tea Party ideal until Trump won and assured us that he would carry the flag into battle. He has not wavered and has bravely withstood the taunts of the “blame America” Democrats and the all talk, no action, Summer soldier, Sunshine patriot, Never Trumpers.
The Democrat and their Never Trumping allies just lost their shut down in the name of the illegal (undocumented) immigrants covered by DACA. They cheaply endangered every U.S. citizen’s Constitutional right to a national defense for non-citizens.
Republicans need to stand together on the conservative, Tea Party agenda and work towards increasing Congressional majorities in the next election so the “blame America” Democrats will not continue their detrimental agenda for U.S. weakness, bureaucracy “gone wild”, and abuse of government agencies like the IRS, FBI, DOJ, etc., for political advantage.

Given your assertion.., kindly list the particular names of the “Never Trumpers”, to which you refer.., and the specific manner, in detail, in which each respective “Never Trumper” melted at Democrat Pary ad hominem attacks and innuendo – please provide names, dates, locations, and details of each alleged episode.
In addition.., please specifically describe how the Democrats and “Never Trumpers” “cheaply endangered every U.S. citizens constitutional right to a national defense for non-citizens”.
Hopefully when you meticulously explain “how”.., readers will come to understand what the heck you mean by “constitutional right to a national defense for non-citizens”.
Then.., feel free to provide proof of Democrats abuse of The FBI and DOJ, and proof of that abuse manifesting into a political advantage for the Dems.
Finally.., who are the “us” that were/are actually assured by Trump carrying a flag into battle, and how can Trump carry a flag into battle with his medical deferment, a deferment preventing him from carrying a flag into a “real” war, you know a war where his contemporaries were killed and maimed, a war where some not-deferred young man took Trump’s place in the specifically numbered draft, a draft whereby for every deferment issued.., another young man took the place of that medically defered individual.

The vicious nature, the capacity to hate of the NeverTrumpers is beyond anything expected.

The Swamp fears exposure first and if successful, hot consequences later so its NTism is at least understandable.

A Nation with a soul and in peril naturally disgorges a Leader like Trump when put to the task.

Left and Right power brokers want Country to reside tentatively in the hearts of the citizenry so that they can carry on treating it as the Category Error they believe it to be. In the meantime, hoping for just enough strength of affection to remain so that it can be used to rally for War.

Other than his tweets and sometimes heavy handed language, Trump has been exactly what I hoped for. Common sense on foreign policy, pragmatic on the economy – with great results so far, strong against illegal immigration, and most importantly not intimidated by the MSM, PC culture, Hollywood or the left in general. He is a fighter – and an excellent one at that!!

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